From the organizers: The Book Catapult proudly welcomes award-winning children's book author & illustrator Carson Ellis for her illustrated adult memoir, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary on Friday, October 11 at 7pm. Carson will be in conversation with bestselling author Maile Meloy. In January 2001, the young artist Carson Ellis moved into a warehouse in Portland, Oregon, with a group of fellow artists. For the first week she lived there, she kept a detailed diary full of dry observations, mordant wit, turn-of-the-millennium cultural touchstones, and hijinks with friends, including her future husband, Colin Meloy, who is now the frontman and lead songwriter of The Decemberists. Two decades later, Carson rediscovered this old journal of hers and richly illustrated it with extraordinary new paintings in the signature style that has made her a bestselling and award-winning picture book author today. One Week in January is a snapshot of a bygone era, a meticulous re-creation of quotidian frustrations and small, meaningful moments, and a meditation on what it means both to start your journey as an artist and to look back at that beginning many years later. It beautifully captures the intensity of feelings and friendships in young adulthood, when everything is completely uncertain, and everything is enormously important. One Week in January is mundane, specific—and somehow completely magical. It’s also very, very funny. And it contains a love story at its heart: The reader recognizes that a romance is beginning to bloom between Carson and Colin, although neither of them realizes it quite yet. Carson Ellis is the author and illustrator of bestselling picture books Home and Du Iz Tak? (a Caldecott Honor book) and the illustrator of several books for children, including The Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket, and The Wildwood Chronicles by Colin Meloy. She has won awards for illustration, and as the illustrator-in-residence for Meloy’s band, The Decemberists, she has received Grammy nominations for album art design. She contributes work to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. Ellis lives on a farm in Oregon.
